Peter N. Peregrine (Professor of Anthropology, Lawrence University and External Professor, Santa Fe Institute)
Abstract. Typological approaches to understanding cultural evolution have been utilized, and strongly criticized, for more than a century (Sanderson 2007). Some of my own work has been a part of that long critique. But recent statistical analyses of cultural evolution suggest that there are patterns of punctuated equilibrium which may correlate with proposed cultural evolutionary typologies (e.g., Peregrine, Ember and Ember, 2004). Thus, there may be some empirical reality to those typologies that make them more useful in the study of cultural evolution than critics have suggested. This paper reviews the evidence for punctuated equilibrium in cultural evolution and posits that reconceptualizing cultural evolutionary typologies as markers of stable evolutionary states might be defensible.
References
Peregrine, Peter N., Carol R. Ember and Melvin Ember
2004 "Universal Patterns in Cultural Evolution: An Empirical Analysis Using Guttman Scaling." American Anthropologist 106(1):145-149.
Sanderson, Stephen
2007 Evolutionism and its Critics. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers.